News

Jasper Griegson’s new website complainer.co.uk went live this week. The site provides useful tips, advice and sample letters for anyone with a gripe. Jasper hopes to use his online presence as a platform for raising his profile alongside social networking and his forthcoming television appearances. This in turn should assist him to launch his next book which will be ready by the Spring.

David Haviland’s The Not-So-Nude Ride of Lady Godiva which explores the entire history of human civilisation, from the Trojan Wars all the way up to the first Iraq War.

Ian Graham’s Imposters which tells the stories of the boldest and most notorious impostors of the past 500 years from fraudulent claimants to thrones and titles, fantasists, fake natives and criminals to women who lived as men.

Roger Crowley’s regular publishers Faber and Random House have commissioned a new book Lords of the Navigation: How the Portuguese launched the age of discovery and the first global empire to be published in 2014.

Congratulations to Sean McMeekin whose The Russian Origins of the FIrst World War has been long-listed for the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize awarded for books on foreign affairs that deepen public debate on important international issues.

The long list Includes: Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe; Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson; On China by Henry Kissinger ;The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama and The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures Of Great Powers by Peter Tomsen.

The five-book shortlist will be announced on Monday, February 13, and the winner on Monday, March 12, 2012. The $15,000 award is presented annually by the Lionel Gelber Foundation, in partnership with Foreign Policy Magazine and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.